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by Gore Vidal

  Finally, Altman is always at his best when he does serious research. Just as the neocons found it necessary to smear Edward Said as a liar who had no real connection with Palestine, it also became necessary for them, in the light of my attack on Sharon for drawing the 1982 blood bath in Lebanon, to invent anti-Semitic quotes allegedly written by me. Altman thinks that this goes back to my “famous comment in 1959 that ‘each year there is a short list of the OK writers. Today’s list consists of two Jews, two Negroes, and a safe floating goy of the old American establishment just to show there is no prejudice in our loving land; only the poor old homosexualists are out.’ ”“The critic Leslie Fiedler acutely pointed out,” writes Altman, “that ‘the comment was written in mock horror but with an undertone of real bitterness too.’ ” Fiedler, a friend during the fifties when we were both living in Athens, is seldom acute in his efforts at criticism convinced as he was, at least back then, that American WASP males were all homosexually inclined particularly in the direction of the likes of Mark Twain’s escaped slave Jim. My use of the list was sardonic and was so perceived at the time. The “two Jews” that I adverted to was to emphasize the point that the American literary establishment had long been centered on the absolute primacy of WASPs and so Jews were marginalized as writers and often proscribed as teachers by college English Departments, to which the late Alfred Kazin so often furiously testified; while African Americans were encouraged to go live in Paris as did Richard Wright and, in the end, Jimmy Baldwin. His first book was turned down by E. P. Dutton where I was then an associate editor and had tried for a year to get Cry Holy, first title for Go Tell It on the Mountain, accepted by Dutton; but the owner, Elliott Macrae, told me: “I can’t publish Baldwin, I’m from Virginia.” Altman thinks that I have largely ignored black literature. Politically minded African Americans are better informed. As recently as a month ago Representative Cynthia McKinney invited me to address the Black Caucus of the House of Representatives. I am also chided for not doing enough about AIDS; but my virological skills are few.

  FIFTY-TWO

  Once these fits of political correctness have passed, Altman has panned a nugget or two of purest gold in the great swamp that is Norman Podhoretz land. “The prominent neoconservative Norman Podhoretz, former editor of Commentary, has claimed that Vidal is clearly anti-Semitic: he identified a piece written by Vidal for the Nation in 1986 as ‘the most blatantly and egregiously anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II.’ In the piece Podhoretz claims Vidal declared that ‘the Jews were impoverishing the United States and bringing the world closer and closer to a nuclear war,’ and warning that ‘the Jews (never mind if they were born here or were naturalized citizens) had better watch out if they wished to stay on among us.’

  “This would be damning,” Altman concedes,

  if indeed Vidal had written it. Checking the original article, to which Podhoretz himself referred me, I cannot find these alleged quotes. What Vidal does say is: “He and Midge [his wife] stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel—a country they don’t seem eager to live in…Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department…”

  Altman continues,

  No mention of the warning to Jews. What is missed in those attacks on Vidal for anti-Semitism is any recognition of his sense of betrayal when some New York Jewish intellectuals, with whom he had mixed as a young writer, enthusiastically denounced the new gay movement. Midge Decter…at Harper’s Magazine…published an article by Joseph Epstein in which he wrote: “If I had the power to do so I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth.” It was Vidal, not the Jewish Decter, who saw the striking parallel in this language to that used by Hitler.

  Although the Bush administration has got us used to the telling of lies about such important matters as war and peace, the thriving cottage industry of ascribing to public figures words that they never said is less well known. But severe laws are in place with very severe penalties for those who, like Norman Podhoretz, simply invent inflammatory statements which he then ascribes to his numerous enemies as their actual words, a practice that should he persist in, he will be, under current law, prison-bound.

  Altman occasionally has trouble keeping separate what my characters think and what I think: “Thus his historical novels refer often to Washington as an African city, without ever giving us a sense of how it might have seemed to the Africans.” First, it is my character Caroline Sanford who was brought up in Europe who was startled to find Washington, D.C., “an African city.” She expresses neither delight nor dismay at the fact she also becomes a friend of an “African” who is related to the black Jefferson family, a first family of the city. Altman then misreads my play Weekend in which the son of a presidential candidate marries an African American. Altman is upset by my jarringly superficial tone which, of course, is the whole point to the exercise: audiences in Washington, where the play first opened, were amused and relieved that the presidential candidate has no feeling at all about race nor does his wife; they only care about the coming election and will such a marriage as their son’s be helpful. When they decide that it will be an electoral plus, there is a mock happy, even ecstatic, ending where they all remember to smile. Opportunism has won again. I am not a playwright who lectures audiences on good citizenship. I don’t have to, as the Black Caucus might have enlightened Altman. He also makes strange leaps in the dark. He writes that the editors of The New York Review of Books “rejected some of Vidal’s pieces particularly those seen as too strident in their criticism of Israel.” There were no such pieces either written by me nor rejected by them. Our only political quarrels were over Robert Kennedy whose nimbus—bright to them—was not visible to me.

  Here I am on Laugh-In in 1971 with June Gable, a marvelous comic who had invented a Latin huckster character called Esmeralda whose speech was surrealist. Here she is explaining to me how she is “an endangered feces.”

  Altman is at his best when he meditates on Sex, Hollywood, Politics, and Religion. He has many wise things to say on those essential subjects which I have spent years trying to get into proper focus, particularly religion. Alongside Altman’s book on my desk there are the uncorrected page proofs of a Duke University Press book called How to Be an Intellectual in the Age of TV subtitled “The Lessons of Gore Vidal,” by Marcie Frank. I met Professor Frank during a panel discussion celebrating the fifty-fifth anniversary of the publication of The City and the Pillar at Yale’s Davies Auditorium. Half a dozen writers/teachers read papers on that ancient novel to a crowd of several hundred interested parties, including myself. I recall Professor Frank’s remarks as sharply witty and now they are the core of a book about how a public intellectual from the hot world of print can survive in the coolest medium of all, television. Frank recalled my idle remark some years ago: “Never pass up the opportunity to have sex or appear on television.” Advice I would never give today in the age of AIDS and its television equivalent Fox News. Since autre temps, autre moeurs as Roseanne Barr might say. Frank links my remark to Andy Warhol’s famous ecumenical prayer: “In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” “Both,” she writes,

  understand television as a transmissions apparatus that links the famous with their audience in a giant circle jerk…Many accounts of the public intellectual suggest that the species is virtually extinct, yet Vidal has been a veritable fixture on the American intellectual scene for the past forty years. Paradoxically, perhaps, his ubiquity in print, in politics, and on big and small screens has discouraged the recognition of his achievements, though a few have overcome the chronic resentment of celebrity that plagues those who tally such matters. For Edward Said, for instance, Vidal is an ideal example of the intellectual; however, this is because of his position as an independent (not institutionally affiliated) expatriate (Vidal moved to Italy in 1963, though in 2004 he returned
to Los Angeles, where he has maintained a residence since 1978)…while he has been almost completely ignored by the academic literary establishment. Although recent interest, academic and other, in matters of gender and sexuality has prompted a slight increase in institutional attention to Vidal, his refusal to be labeled as gay and his insistence that no identities follow from sexual practices have proved problematic for those who would include him in a gay canon…Vidal has been slippery to categorize because he has consistently played against expectations. In blurring the fine line between insider and outsider, he redefined those boundaries…[H]e wrote The City and the Pillar (1948), the first American novel to depict homosexual sex explicitly, yet this did not stop him from running for public office twice, first for Congress in 1960, as a Democrat in heavily Republican upstate New York, and then for the Democratic nomination for Senate in 1982, against Jerry Brown.

  Frank and others seem not to believe that by publishing The City and the Pillar I had permanently shut the door on a political career because I did run twice and in the first race got the most votes for a Democrat since 1910 and in the second got half a million votes while spending the least money in a field of nine candidates. But that was that. Hardly anyone goes into American politics without wanting to go, ultimately, all the way. But I could not, for demonstrable reasons. Although The New York Times never covered elections in the 29th Congressional District so far to the north of Times Square, they sent a special journalist called Ira Freeman to do the necessary ax job. He kept giggling nervously and repeating over and over again, “I don’t know anything about politics.” He did know how to smear, of course; and did.

  Frank offers an account of the film Visit to a Small Planet, originally a play for television, then a play for Broadway and, finally, terminally, a movie with the dread Jerry Lewis who Frank tells us: “According to Lewis, it was Vidal’s idea to cast him.” It was Vidal’s idea to cast David Niven and Paramount agreed; then Lewis, somehow, got the part which he played as a nine-year-old from outer space. Frank is a truly audacious explorer in the rain forest of my career. She finds shadowy monsters unknown to me and similarities where I find none. Jacqueline Susann was a popular novelist who exploited TV in her successful efforts to sell her exciting and excited novels, largely about feminine ailments and addictions. Although I have never read her I enjoyed meeting her several times with her large dark eyes whose thick false lashes resembled a pair of tarantulas in a postcoital state. Frank writes:

  But, like Susann, Jerry Lewis has much in common with Vidal’s Myra. I put Vidal in the company of Susann (just as I put him in the company of Jerry Lewis earlier) in order to suggest an alternative genealogy for the intellectual, one excluded from those accounts that have been dominated by the print-based model of the intellectual. If Vidal maintains the status of exemplary American writer-intellectual in the age of TV, it is because he has both exploited the print-screen circuit in the genre of romance and found ways to transmit his sexual politics on-screen.

  Frank is very good on Live from Golgotha though its alleged subtitle is not “The Gospel According to Gore Vidal,” an addition made by a creative dust-jacket designer. My Gospel would have been very different. “James Tatum has given a persuasive exposition of Vidal’s adherence to the world of Roman which he calls Vidal’s Romanitas. Underwriting Vidal’s Romanitas is a universalism evident in his treatments of sexuality but also there in his mode of political address. The example of Vidal should thus prompt an alternative account of the intellectual and the media that would consider the prospects of universalism in our day.” Now Ms. Frank is getting to the engine room of her subject. The first grown-up book that I read on my own was a nineteenth-century edition of Tales from Livy that I’d found in my grandfather’s library. Although in school I was like so many others persecuted with Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars of which Montaigne observed that although every reader is eager to know why he was so brilliant a general, not to mention a transformer of the old republic into a principate suitable for himself, he tells us nothing interesting on those subjects so busy is he trying to convince us what a greater engineer he was. (I, though not a general, generalize like the emperor and god-to-be.) Frank handles this most originally:

  Perversely, perhaps, when I call Vidal’s intellectual career an exercise in televisual classicism I take my cue from the man whom Vidal obliterated from his alternative political history of the United States: Richard Nixon. It was Nixon who recognized and confirmed Vidal’s classic status. When asked to what purposes he would put the auditorium of his presidential library, Nixon said that it should be used to reenact “great debates like—oh, Vidal and Buckley’s 1968 battle” had brought sexuality into the political arena, something the noncharismatic, conservative Nixon would seem the least likely to have recognized, but here Nixon confers on Vidal and Buckley the status of national treasures.

  FIFTY-THREE

  “Bemoaning the demise of the serious novel, or the disintegration of literary fame, as the consequence of the loss of history makes Vidal’s satirical stance reminiscent of Alexander Pope. He thus might seem to support those who believe in the decline of the intellectual or of literary seriousness. But Vidal simultaneously overrides Pope’s famous definition of wit—‘What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’—by expressing it so well, so often, verbatim. Such reproduction, enabled by the central position of television in Vidal’s writing, points to the future possibilities suggested by Myra’s utopian mission, to ‘re-create the sexes and thus save the human race from certain extinction.’ Exploiting the television commercial as ‘the last demonstration of necessary love in the West,’ Vidal successfully negotiates a public role for the author as intellectual on the basis of the circuit that he establishes between the page and the movie screen, a circuit that relies on the mediation of that amnesia-inducing and immortality-producing medium: the television. Vidal uses TV to ward off the blurring of the boundaries between culture and politics in identity-based politics. He exploits the congruencies among critiques of genetic, genital, and technological determinism. By these means, he has refused to be ghettoized…in TV he has found both a vehicle through which to convey his politics and a mode of address for a new televisual public, that is, a public conditioned by television even when it reads. Vidal’s career teaches us that it is possible to remain a universal intellectual in the age of TV. He has done so by negotiating the print-screen circuit.”

  FIFTY-FOUR

  Irony has never had an easy time of it in our American version of English. We tend to bald bold literal statements whether it be during a sales pitch to someone who may be persuaded to buy a used car that once belonged to a blind octogenarian widow whose car had never accrued so much as a fraction of vulgar mileage. Lately I’ve noted that the notion of irony, if not irony itself, is suddenly abroad. Particularly on television. All sorts of young and not-so-young people when they say something that has a slightly tinny sound will, simultaneously, hold up both hands with forefingers extended on either side of the head to mean, I think, that the statement is in quotation marks because…well, what? That the statement for some reason is suspect? Untrue? Moot? Whatever the gesture means, I suspect that, at times, irony may be intended but the very concept of irony is unusual in our language featuring as it does enthusiastic declarative sentences sometimes true but if, in quotes, perhaps, false: so caveat auditor.

  Since much of what I say and write tends to the ironic (without, however, the cute bracketing fingers) I should like to end this memoir with, first, a definition of irony and, second, a demonstration of irony in action that ended in catastrophic murder.

  The best of dictionaries of English words and their usage is the Oxford English Dictionary. Here is their listing for “irony”:

  1) A figure of speech in which the intended meaning is the opposite of that expressed by the words used; usually taking the form of sarcasm or ridicule in which laudatory expressions are used to imply condemnation or contempt.

  2)
A condition of affairs or events of a character opposite to what was, or might naturally be, expected; a contradictory outcome of events as if in mockery of the promise and fitness of things.

  Let’s keep this last definition in mind as I now tell a tale for midnight.

  In 1961 a new president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, was inaugurated at the age of forty-three. With him a new generation had taken the crown from the older generation as represented by General Eisenhower. There was triumphant talk of a new frontier presumably to be crossed by all of us into a new bright land where the only shadow that marred the prospect was that of the hideous, murderous specter of international Communism centered upon the Soviet Union against whom JFK had sworn to bear any burden to ensure the ultimate victory of freedom, liberty, and so on. But early on, starting in 1959, under the general direction of the then vice president Richard M. Nixon, who had many interesting Cuban Mob connections (yes, Bebe Rebozo his mysterious friend was also linked not only to mobsters but to the Cuban dictator Batista who had been overthrown by Fidel Castro to the annoyance of the Mob, an annoyance that turned to fury when Castro shut down, if only briefly, the Mafia-run Havana casinos). Elements of the CIA were soon attempting to murder Castro who, like all Nixon enemies, was if not yet a Communist, worse, a Communist dupe. The presidential election of 1960 was a close one fought by Nixon and John F. Kennedy, an attractive Massachusetts senator whose father had, ironically, dealings with many mobsters during the pre–World War Two period, as well as at the time of the prohibition of alcohol. The late film producer Ray Stark told me how, during the short presidency of JFK, Joe Kennedy and Frank Costello (the retired N.Y. Mob overlord) would often have dinner at Kennedy’s Central Park South apartment and rehash old crimes, often in the company of a retired Teamster who gave great massages. Joe’s Mob connections were useful to Jack in the 1960 election and could easily have saved JFK’s life in 1963 had Bobby Kennedy, in the interest of building himself up in the public’s eyes, not started arresting important mobsters particularly in the so-called Apalachin Mob Conference bust where they had all come together to confer about the succession to the leadership of the New York Mob. I’ve long since forgotten how I first heard of the plot to kill JFK, while I had no idea at all of the Kennedy brothers’ plot to kill Castro on December 1, 1963, until I read a recent book by Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann called Ultimate Sacrifice. It was assumed that the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 had sufficiently alarmed JFK and Castro’s mentor, Khrushchev, so that they jointly backed down, putting an end, so everyone thought, to such dangerous adventures. JFK had pledged not to invade Cuba if Castro would allow inspections of any remaining missiles on the island. Since Castro did not cooperate, JFK then regarded his pledge as inoperative. “In the spring of 1963,” according to Ultimate Sacrifice (more a literal than an ironic title), “John and Robert Kennedy started laying the groundwork for a coup against Fidel Castro that would eventually be set for what they called C-Day: December, 1 1963.” Bobby, like Nixon before him, was in charge of what would be the most secretive operation of its sort in our history. Since the CIA had, in the eyes of the Kennedys, botched the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the Department of Defense was to be in charge of this adventure which would first engage Mob hit men to assassinate Castro and then replace him with a provisional government that would implore the United States to come to its aid and restore order. Ours is a society riddled with plots of every kind from, let’s say, one to bribe certain members of Congress to cheat the Indians of their casino money to the financing, often secretly, of numerous presidential elections while, simultaneously, great companies like Enron cheat customers, stockholders, employees; yet anyone who draws attention to all of this corruption is quickly denounced as a conspiracy theorist who means to undo the great fiction that anything truly wicked, at least in the murder line, must be the work of a sole solitary “nut” who is simply Evil; hence, the setting up of Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone crazed killer of JFK despite his own brief but presumably accurate statement after his Dallas arrest: “I’m the patsy”; then, as planned, his being gunned down by Jack Ruby, a fellow CIA “asset” (I use dumb quotes denoting that neither, strictly speaking, was a real asset in the literal sense but each had a role to play); Oswald as lone killer for no reason at all and addled Ruby, a onetime Chicago mobster, who claimed to be deeply worried about the stress that all this must be causing the widow Kennedy.